A huge new class action lawsuit has been filed by big publishers and authors against Google over AI training.
It opens: "Desperate to maintain its online dominance, Google abandoned its early motto of 'Don’t be evil' and engaged in one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history."
It alleges that Google:
- took millions of books / articles provided to them for use only in Google Books, Google Play Books, and Google Scholar, and secretly used them to train LLMs
- had internal discussions where they flagged that using books publishers had provided them for other purposes was "highly problematic for Google" and could lead to "$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines"
- also trained on works from pirate sites & from behind paywalls
- used all this to build an AI system that competes with the works Google copied